If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Mac OS X 10.6.2 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

11-18-2009, 05:00 AM

Phoronix: Mac OS X 10.6.2 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

Back in August upon the launch of Apple's Snow Leopard we delivered benchmarks comparing Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6 along with initial benchmarks of how Ubuntu 9.10 was running against Mac OS X 10.6. Since that time though Ubuntu 9.10 has been officially released with various changes since last August and Apple has issued two point releases for Snow Leopard, now putting it at version 10.6.2. As we await the release of FreeBSD 8.0 to deliver a larger operating system comparison, we have carried out a fresh round of tests comparing Mac OS X 10.6.2 and Ubuntu 9.10 (both x86 and x86_64 editions) under a variety of tests.

Comment

It looks like Mac OS/X's parallel processing agility is more than a bit of marketing if the ray tracing performance is to be believed. It would be very interesting to see how GCD compares with MPI when more software becomes available.

Comment

Mac OS X 10.6.2 though had a particularly strong advantage in the heavy computational tests like Crafty,...

Wrong (about Crafty). If you'd compiled 32 bit craft on OS X, it would have been slow there. I think you're being fooled by the lack of a 32bit OS X benchmark. Crafty heavily depends on 64bit operations. Chess boards have 64 squares, and crafty uses 64 bit ints as "bit board" bitmaps. It probably has to AND, OR, and XOR 64 bit ints all over the place, so no wonder it's more than 3 times slower on a register-poor 32 bit architecture. I haven't looked up other (non PTS) crafty benchmarks, but there are lots published. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this 32 vs 64 slowdown is typical.

The other wins for OS X are interesting, and some are either better filesystem performance, or performance regressions from gcc 4.2.1 to 4.4.1 (if those were the respective compiler versions). Some probably are actually better multi-thread handling by the OS, which is of course most interesting, since that's one thing you can't solve just by trying your code with different gcc versions to find which one makes the fastest binary.

Which benchmarks are compiled from source, and which aren't? I expect most/all of the computational ones are, but what about e.g. Nexuiz? They distribute handy binaries...

Comment

Wrong (about Crafty). If you'd compiled 32 bit craft on OS X, it would have been slow there. I think you're being fooled by the lack of a 32bit OS X benchmark. Crafty heavily depends on 64bit operations. Chess boards have 64 squares, and crafty uses 64 bit ints as "bit board" bitmaps. It probably has to AND, OR, and XOR 64 bit ints all over the place, so no wonder it's more than 3 times slower on a register-poor 32 bit architecture. I haven't looked up other (non PTS) crafty benchmarks, but there are lots published. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this 32 vs 64 slowdown is typical.

The other wins for OS X are interesting, and some are either better filesystem performance, or performance regressions from gcc 4.2.1 to 4.4.1 (if those were the respective compiler versions). Some probably are actually better multi-thread handling by the OS, which is of course most interesting, since that's one thing you can't solve just by trying your code with different gcc versions to find which one makes the fastest binary.

Which benchmarks are compiled from source, and which aren't? I expect most/all of the computational ones are, but what about e.g. Nexuiz? They distribute handy binaries...

I've had my MBP (unibody late 2008) tri booting with a 500gb hard drive. One of the main purposes was to see if i could gain a performance advantage while still maintaining software compatibility. The last time i had used ubuntu before this was jaunty, so i was looking forward to it.

While i was able to install Wow, with wine, most modern games are not supported. I got RTCW running as well and i fail to see ubuntu spank OS X in frame rates.

RTCW is Q3 engine, so i should see it but i don't, The Frame rates are generally within 10fps.

I don't get how you guys alone have found this open GL bug in OS 10, I don't have it, can't prove it, and no one else has said anything for the months 10.6 has been around. (aka, i personally think your full of shit)